I’ve been working on a draft design of Make No Wonder, which you can play here. It’s definitely a little rough around the edges at this point, but I’ve resolved a couple of major bugs which were slowing things down. One huge drawback to browser-based game development is that every browser has its own quirks, especially with lesser-used features such as SVG. I’m using the Raphaël library, which is convenient in some ways, but working with both it and jQuery occasionally causes problems.

This draft version demonstrates a few of my ideas for Make No Wonder, including randomly generated islands, collecting objects to increase mobility, and the player leaving a permanent trail behind them. It’s fairly simple for now, but now that I have the basic engine working, I can start to include more complex environments and interactivity. Right now I’m working on adding the mouse-based controls from my Newfoundland Hex Map Interaction to this design.

The screenshots above are from a slightly earlier version of the game where stones were coloured yellow. The islands generated at the moment are fairly simple, and stick to a grid – I need to combine this version with some of the code from my earlier experiments (see my Random Islands post). There are also problems at the moment when the islands generated are bigger than your browser window – try reloading the page to get a new random collection of islands if that happens.